ROWAN Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury since 2002, was given a rough ride by the media earlier this year over his suggestion that aspects of Sharia Law could be incorporated into UK civil law. He also came close to presiding over the disintegration of the ‘Anglican Communion’ over issues of gender and sexuality during the Lambeth conference.
However, in my view, this humble and soft-spoken Welsh intellectual is an excellent Archbishop of Canterbury, not least because he has few issues with the disestablishment of his own church.
Interviewed by John Humphrys on BBC Radio Four ‘s Today show on Thursday morning, Dr Rowan Williams indicated that he welcomed the financial and economic crisis, as he believes it is providing a much needed “reality check” for a society that has become obsessed by consumption.
He also lambasted the government of prime minister Gordon Brown for its neo-Kenyesian, debt-funded stimulation of the economy — which he thinks could condemn us to repeating the sins the past.
Rowan Williams denounces compulsive accumulation
The spiritual leader of the Anglican communion told Humphrys that Britain has been “going in the wrong direction” for decades, as people have become obsessed with making money, rather than making of things. He remarked that his hope is that the current downturn will force a rethink and lead to a better understanding of the true meaning of wealth.
“It is a sort of reality check, isn’t it, which is always good for us,” said Rowan Williams. “A reminder that what I think some people have called ‘fairy gold’ is just that – that sooner or later you have to ask ‘what are we making or what are assembling or accumulating wealth for?’”
Both Rowan Williams and the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, have already denounced the workings of the financial markets. As the scale of the financial collapse started to emerge in mid September, Dr Sentamu denounced short-sellers who preyed on banks as “clearly bank robbers and asset strippers”.
Rowan Williams questioned the way in which “unbridled capitalism” has become accepted as a kind of mythology. Writing in The Spectator in September, Dr Williams said the current crisis has “exposed the element of basic unreality in the situation – the truth that almost unimaginable wealth has been generated by equally unimaginable levels of fiction, paper transactions with no concrete outcome beyond profit for traders”.
The archbishop urged people against putting faith in the markets, or deceiving themselves into thinking that markets would ever work for the common good.
In yesterday’s BBC radio interview, Dr Rowan Williams questioned Gordon Brown’s to stimulate the economy with spending and a cut in VAT, warning that it was “a little bit like the addict returning to the drug”.
He said people should not “spend to save the economy” but for “human reasons”.
Although Rowan Williams acknowledged he was not trained as an economist, he was at pains to convey what he evidently sees as wider truth transcending the current economic malaise.
By this, he means the tendency of people to see making money as an end in its own right, rather than a means to provide for people’s welfare.
In a separate interview with The New Statesman, Rowan Williams said that Karl Marx was right, and said the banking crisis was “the moment everybody’s bluff is pulled at once.”